Variety's Scores

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For 17,779 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 52% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.4 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 IMAX: Hubble 3D
Lowest review score: 0 Divorce: The Musical
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,134 out of 17779
  2. Mixed: 7,009 out of 17779
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17779
17779 movie reviews
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  1. Golf in the Kingdom
    In this shoestring outing, Susan Streitfeld ("Female Perversions") opts for an unsettling mix of low-tech cinematic tricks and temporal reshufflings to simulate the process of enlightenment to sometimes laudable, usually ludicrous effect.
  2. Habermann
    More soap opera than high drama, the film is confused and confusing, and tedious to boot.
  3. Bad Posture
    Bad dialogue and bad acting might convince some of the authenticity behind Bad Posture, but there's no getting around the tedious navel-gazing of Malcolm Murray's fiction debut.
  4. Damn!
    Even at 73 minutes, the film is, well, too damn long.
  5. Stripped Down
    Lacks the delicate tonal control and subtle smarts required for such an intended half-surreal exercise.
  6. Bunraku
    It's a picture that's akin to a terrarium of plastic flowers -- gaudily decorative, but airless and lifeless.
  7. After Earth
    Shyamalan is clearly a director-for-hire here, his disinterest palpable from first frame to last. Nowhere in evidence is the gifted "Sixth Sense" director who once brought intricately crafted setpieces and cinematic sleight-of-hand to even the least of his own movies.
  8. 1911
    Resulting mish-mash of exposition and speechifying opts to summarize rather than dramatize; one spends nearly as much time reading indigestible lumps of onscreen text as one does listening to the often distractingly post-dubbed dialogue.
  9. The Catechism Cataclysm
    In the curious absence of religious satire, toilet humor isn't enough to constitute comedy, while the leads' grating performances make 81 minutes feel eternal.
  10. The Divide
    Plodding and repetitive in its efforts to maintain pressure-cooker intensity, The Divide resembles nothing so much as an extended "Twilight Zone" episode as it brings a sci-fi twist to a familiar scenario about stressed characters who bring out the worst in each other while trapped in close quarters.
  11. 13
    A starry cast and glossier production values simply work against the black-and-white original's strengths in this stillborn thriller about a deadly game of chance.
  12. A Novel Romance
    Grotesquely straining to ridicule and validate its hero simultaneously, A Novel Romance will disappoint even Guttenberg diehards.
  13. In Heaven Underground: The Weissensee Jewish Cemetery
    Her (Wauer) attempt to relieve uncomfortable events with happy stories makes for a disturbing superficiality, and a "make your own Jewish grave" student project is plain offensive. Score is omnipresent and insufferable.
  14. Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl
    A comic routine that quickly grows stale as the film devolves into a soppy romance sustained solely by the actors' chemistry.
  15. Beneath the Darkness
    A malformed, would-be horror shocker with a deliriously deranged performance by Dennis Quaid, who unfortunately seems to be the only one onboard who thinks he's in a comedy.
  16. Tyler Perry's Temptation
    Significantly lacking in star wattage (including Perry’s own), this sluggish, relentlessly downbeat portrait of a young couple in crisis should play well to Perry’s fanbase.
  17. Bad Fever
    Dustin Guy Defa's Bad Fever takes mumblecore to its reductio ad absurdum, featuring a hero whose utterances border on the unintelligible.
  18. Reuniting the Rubins
    Its humor and sentimentality equally labored, this by-the-numbers picture will look better, albeit still not good, as a latenight cable or streaming time-killer.
  19. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie
    Recycles characters and plotlines from their show, along with badly made commercials and faux PSAs about inane subjects, a gambit that dates back to such comedy compilations as "Kentucky Fried Movie" or even "Laugh-In." What Tim & Eric has that those others lacked are the many sexually outre, scatological and degrading moments that seem intended to shock -- and perhaps will, if you're really young or really old.
  20. Kinyarwanda
    Doubly disappointing considering that it marks the first feature by Rwandan filmmakers to address the country's 1994 Hutu-on-Tutsi genocide, Kinyarwanda awkwardly and fitfully patches together a half-dozen story strands meant to provide a panoramic view of war and reconciliation.
  21. Dark Tide
    It's a murky sea that surrounds Dark Tide. A soap opera with shark attacks, picture contains a few alarming sequences but loses its grip on its material -- and the viewer -- in a swirling vortex of visual confusion.
  22. Woman Thou Art Loosed: On the 7th Day
    Woman Thou Art Loosed: On the 7th Day is crammed with enough melodramatic incident for three movies, all of them seemingly scripted by Tyler Perry in a very foul mood.
  23. Battlefield America
    A picture so thoroughly generic as to suggest a contraption assembled from spare parts with the aid of a how-to manual.
  24. Battle of the Year
    So fatally frontloaded with endless training montages, awfully written, indifferently acted drama, sports-film platitudes and jaw-dropping product placements that only the hardiest of viewers will make it through to the payoff.
  25. Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
    It takes at least a sliver of human interest to make a noir pastiche more than the sum of its influences, and anything resembling authentic feeling has been neatly airbrushed away from this movie’s synthetic surface.
  26. The Babymakers
    Yet another attempt to mix raunchy excess and romantic-comedy sweetness in an anything-goes raucous farce, The Babymakers offers a few big laughs between ho-hum stretches of frenetic vamping.
  27. The Girl from the Naked Eye
    Gets one's attention but doesn't keep it, due to ill-cued flashbacks, groan-inducing dialogue and wooden performances.
  28. That's What She Said
    This crude, shrill day in the life of three ill-matched Manhattan women will prove as irksome to most viewers as it is to the protags.
  29. Home Run Showdown
    Home Run Showdown serves up an uninspiring premise — a competition among little-leaguers to catch the most outs at a home run derby — and goes downhill from there.
  30. Assassin's Bullet
    Much of this makes little sense, but it's hard to care.
  31. The Paperboy
    A risibly overheated, not unenjoyable slab of late-'60s Southern pulp trash, marked by a sticky, sweaty atmosphere of delirium and sexual frustration that only partly excuses the woozy ineptitude of the filmmaking.
  32. The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure
    The low-budget production feels chintzy and impossibly square, even by tyke standards.
  33. Bringing Up Bobby
    A technically competent but painfully broad dramedy about a larcenous mother-and-son duo in the Midwest. This gender-flipped, latter-day "Paper Moon" lacks that film's judicious restraint, among other things, alternating hick Americana cartoonishness with maudlin appeals to the tear ducts.
  34. Electoral Dysfunction
    Satirist and "Daily Show" ex-contributor Mo Rocca's faux-disingenuous tone and nonstop jocularity dominate the documentary to quickly grating effect, significantly diminishing its impact.
  35. Trade of Innocents
    Unfortunately, with its unconvincing action, preachy script and flat performances, the picture winds up less moving than most typical journeyman documentaries on the subject.
  36. Smiley
    By-the-numbers slasher picture Smiley starts by borrowing the key concept of "Candyman," ends with a denouement heavily indebted to "Scream," and stuffs its middle with a dismayingly high quotient of lazy false scares.
  37. Tai Chi Zero
    Manages the curious feat of being at once relentlessly energetic and almost continually uninvolving; the title more or less sums up the amount of pleasure to be had here.
  38. Unmasked Judeophobia
    This transparent piece of propaganda blatantly overplays its hand.
  39. I Will Follow You Into the Dark
    For a supernatural thriller that spends so much time on material that is neither supernatural nor thrilling, there’s not nearly enough effort put into credible, complex character writing, leaving the cast only so much ability to fill in the gaps.
  40. Oldboy
    Lee and Protosevich have made a picture that, although several shades edgier than the average Hollywood thriller, feels content to shadow its predecessor’s every move while falling short of its unhinged, balls-out delirium.
  41. A Haunted House
    The hit-to-miss ratio is less than impressive throughout A Haunted House, a frenetic and freewheeling satirical comedy that only sporadically scores a bull's-eye while aiming at easy targets.
  42. Getaway
    Easily one of the dopiest major studio releases since Elie Samaha got out of the business.
  43. Black Rock
    Straining to be a distaff “Deliverance,” indie thriller Black Rock is unable to shock, much less convince.
  44. Saving Grace B. Jones
    Most of what Stevens has concocted here is hard to take, notably the characters' curious relationship with the rain that threatens to drown Missouri, and serves as a soggy metaphor. Sometimes it only rains in half the frame; sometimes people coming out of downpours are wet, sometimes they're not; sometimes they're wet and it's not raining.
  45. The Monuments Men
    Clooney has transformed a fascinating true-life tale into an exceedingly dull and dreary caper pic cum art-appreciation seminar — a museum-piece movie about museum people.
  46. The Counselor
    The script is nearly all dialogue, including several eloquent spoken passages toward the end, but it’s a lousy story, ineptly constructed and rendered far too difficult to follow.
  47. Baggage Claim
    Chemistry you can fake, but charm is far harder to pull off, and Baggage Claim never quite succeeds on that front.
  48. She's All That
    While there are a few good jokes and sight gags along the way, the main impression left by She's All That is how numbingly consistent its lack of originality is.
  49. Phantom
    The potential for screw-tightening suspense gets lost amid the ineffectual dramatics in Phantom, a feeble fictionalization of a crucial but little-known moment when a rogue Soviet submarine brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Kafka
    The story ultimately feels too conventional, and the portrait of the artist is too shallow to stand as a compelling or convincing evocation of a complex mind.
  51. Lotus Eaters
    Picture has some redeeming features, like its glossy, fashion-shoot-inspired black-and-white look, and a clutch of respectable performances among some very poor ones from the toothsome young cast, but the script is a mess, the characters barely sympathetic.
  52. Annie
    The film replaces choreography with metronomic editing, while one-note overstatement drowns out character development.
  53. Gummo
    Gummo is personal, honest and raw, but it's also erratic, self-indulgent and full of ideas that are not fully explored. [8 Sept. 1997, p.80]
    • Variety
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Beverly Hills Cop II
    Beverly Hills Cop II is a noisy, numbing, unimaginative, heartless remake of the original film...Murphy keeps things entertainingly afloat with his sassiness, raunchy one-liners, take-charge brazenness and innate irreverence.
    • Variety
  55. Filly Brown
    The resulting film is a trite piece of storytelling, with character development and plot points that feel not so much lived in as borrowed from other movies.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
    Even die-hard Trekkies may be disappointed by Star Trek V. Coming after Leonard Nimoy's delightful directorial outing on Star Trek IV, William Shatner's inauspicious feature directing debut is a double letdown.
    • Variety
  57. Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension
    There may well be new and novel ways to spark audience shivers from not-so-bright homeowners inexplicably using their cameraphones to check out bumps in the night, but this series clearly has neither the patience nor the inclination to look for them anymore.
  58. Only God Forgives
    The wallpaper emotes more than Ryan Gosling does in Only God Forgives, an exercise in supreme style and minimal substance.
  59. The Legend of Hercules
    Lutz’s acting muscles aren’t nearly as well developed as his pectorals and deltoids, and while the role may not call for a master thespian, it at least begs someone who can emote without looking like he’s straining to execute a dead lift.
  60. Generation Um...
    This scrappy, draggy study in soul-crushing failure and disappointment is noteworthy primarily as a showcase for its lead actor’s most quintessentially Keanu performance in years.
  61. Vehicle 19
    Neither particularly fast nor furious.
  62. Lovelace
    Reducing an immensely disturbing, politically byzantine tale to a series of cartoonish vignettes, this celeb-studded biopic squanders a gutsy performance by Amanda Seyfried.
  63. Dracula Untold
    Dracula Untold opts for the stately, staid approach, and even at a mere 85 minutes (sans credits) it’s something of a bore — neither scary nor romantic nor exciting in any of the ways it seems to intend.
  64. Sex Tape
    Sex Tape is an unaccountable drag — strained, toothless and far too tame to achieve the sort of outrageous, raunchy-titillating effect it’s aiming for.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Valentino's Ghost
    The burning topic of Muslim (mis)representation in U.S. media is not well served by Michael Singh’s amateurish and ill-defined docu Valentino’s Ghost.
  66. Devil's Due
    The film expends plenty of effort crafting a few memorable freakout setpieces and nailing down the logistics of its found-footage camera placement, yet it offers precious little in the way of real scares or engaging characters, and even less in original ideas.
  67. Shield of Straw
    Even the hackiest of Hollywood writers would have known how to fix its considerable script problems.
  68. Blood Ties
    The tension rarely rises above a low boil.
  69. I Do
    A romantic-comedy melodrama that’s too gentle by half.
  70. 3 Days to Kill
    The lukewarm family dynamics sit awkwardly alongside equally underwhelming action sequences.
  71. Homefront
    What sounds like a veritable B-movie wet dream — with that master of the subzero scowl, Jason Statham, starring in a screenplay written by Sylvester Stallone — turns out to be considerably less than the sum of its parts.
  72. That Awkward Moment
    The pic falls well short of its efforts to combine the raucous vulgarity of the “Hangover” movies with Cameron Crowe-ish depth of feeling.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Keep
    Buried deep within The Keep’s mysterious exterior lies that chilling Hollywood question: how do these dogs get made?
  74. Universal Soldier
    In an equally damning commentary on the acting and Roland Emmerich’s direction, Lundgren and Van Damme are both more realistic as stoic cadavers than they are once their memories start to return.
  75. Adore
    A ludicrous melodrama that begs to be handled as an over-the-top sex farce is instead treated with the solemnity of a wake, albeit one with a rather lenient dress code.
  76. Dealin' with Idiots
    For once, truth in advertising: Dealin’ With Idiots spends 83 minutes doing exactly that.
  77. The Lifeguard
    Lambert brings a forlorn dimension to his seductive young role, but Bell never really convinces as the older woman. Despite flirting with controversy, the actress seems reluctant to plunge fully into potential unlikability, nor does the film quite give her the chance.
  78. The Rooftop
    Like a school pageant with a Broadway-sized budget, this noisy production is a pileup of extravagant dance numbers, candy-colored sets and vintage props that, sans the requisite heart or hip factor, soon overstays its welcome.
  79. I Declare War
    The concept is thought-provoking but the execution is flat-footed.
  80. Parkland
    Granted, Landesman feels an obligation to history, but there’s something ponderously obvious about the way so many of these scenes are played.
  81. Winter's Tale
    The best miracles are those that creep up on you unexpectedly rather than endlessly announcing themselves, and the ones in Winter’s Tale are fatally obvious and self-congratulatory.
  82. Chappie
    Intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is one of the major casualties of Chappie, a robot-themed action movie that winds up feeling as clunky and confused as the childlike droid with which it shares its name.
  83. The Zero Theorem
    A sci-fi confection that, at best, momentarily recalls the dystopian whimsy of the director’s best-loved effort, “Brazil,” but ends up dissolving into a muddle of unfunny jokes and half-baked ideas, all served up with that painful, herky-jerky Gilliam rhythm.
  84. Dark Tourist
    Character actor Michael Cudlitz’s first leading role is the sole selling point of Dark Tourist, a well-acted but rote and ultimately repellent character study of a psychologically disturbed loner.
  85. Search Party
    As it stands, there are only enough comic ideas here, most of them bad ones, to reach 82 minutes; the other 11 are taken up by a postscript scene, a blooper, and closing credits that move, in the words of Scarlett O’Hara, as slow as molasses in January.
  86. American Milkshake
    Milkshake sucks all the flavor out of a tasty premise.
  87. Ass Backwards
    Ass Backwards proves that no amount of comic talent can shine — or raise a chuckle — in the absence of even halfway decent material.
  88. Nothing Left to Fear
    Features fewer small-town scares than a rerun of “Dawson’s Creek” and more wooden acting than a marionette theater. Memo to Rob Zombie: Don’t fear the competition.
  89. Sweetwater
    Fancy-sounding dialogue and handsome widescreen lensing goes only so far to disguise the shallowness of the underlying material.
  90. Unacceptable Levels
    Unacceptable Levels marries folksy astonishment and alarmist speculation in a documentary far too easy to dismiss.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Prince of Darkness
    Carpenter spends so much time turning the screws on the next scare that he completely forsakes his actors, who are already stranded with a shoddy script.
  92. Cleaver's Destiny
    Hampered by pedestrian, underpopulated mise-en-scene, a sketchy script and uneven thesping, “Destiny” definitely underwhelms.
  93. A Case of You
    A lot of interesting, funny performers aren’t very interesting or funny in director Kat Corio’s A Case of You.
  94. Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas
    An exceptionally poor piece of holiday cash-in product, rushed and ungainly even by the low standard set by Perry's seven previous Madea films, yet it should be every bit as profitable.
  95. Argento's Dracula 3D
    Director Argento half-heartedly mixes schlocky 3D f/x with one-dimensional characters for a near-two-hour joke that ought to have been funnier.
  96. Beauty and the Beast
    There’s digital wizardry galore in this Beauty and the Beast, but precious little magic.
  97. Warcraft
    So good at making the most outlandish elements of his first two films seem completely credible, Jones can’t find a way to get this cartoony spectacle to soar. His heartfelt approach to the material only underlines the silliness.
  98. CZ12
    Taking more than a dozen credits, including helmer-scribe, Jackie Chan emerges a Jackie-of-all-trades and master of none.
  99. I'm in Love with a Church Girl
    The road to hell is paved with well-intentioned clunkers like I’m in Love with a Church Girl, a strenuously sincere but tediously schematic and heavy-handed attempt at cinematic proselytizing for Christianity.
  100. 2 Jacks
    Slack narrative and abysmal dialogue render the vague generational satire meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with Tolstoy’s work (and depressing to those in the know).
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